Sophia Banks started her career as a stylist and designer, before starting her career as a film director with Making It On Time (2017), a short film for fashion designer Christian Siriano. Her last two short films have showcased an interest in science fiction; Unregistered (2018) premiered at Tribeca Film Festival and went the extra […]
Post-apocalyptic cinema tends to be full of sound and fury. Even if we don’t see the cataclysmic event which overthrows society, we certainly see the aftermath: ruins, road gangs, disease, deprivation. But what if the kind of deprivation shown to us was of a different kind? What if the loss incurred from such an event […]
Arkansas, 1999. Mandy (Angela Bettis) is the world’s most disinterested nurse at the local hospital, and we meet her just ahead of a double shift. This isn’t the only reason she’s a little curt, though. To give her credit, her apparent disinclination for nursing is multifaceted: she’s a drug addict who enjoys hoovering up any […]
My experience of Mexican cinema tends towards the non-mainstream, admittedly, but even based on the little I do know, it seems that lurching straight into the strange and the bloody unreasonable is a niche national pastime. And so we come to Violent Delights a.k.a Beber de tu Sangre, which certainly starts as it means to […]
Well, that was the year that was. Every year when I write up a ‘best of’ list, I can’t help but add a preamble about how things have been, what developments there have been and so on; never has there been a year like 2020, and no preamble can really do justice to the impact […]
It’s very sad to hear of the passing of Great Britain’s very own pulp horror legend Guy N. Smith. And yes, I do think that ‘legend’ is an appropriate term here. I’m ready to believe that Smith’s long writing career never made him a particularly rich man even if he did, happily, do well from […]
I’m afraid Matt Glasby’s book came to me via a place of great perplexity, but one which hasn’t ultimately done it any harm. When first approached to cover it, I happened upon an inexplicably angry review of the book by a woman who, in a similar vein, had angrily reviewed a Kate Summerscale book because […]
Alongside the Borley Rectory haunting, the story of the ‘Bell Witch’ (or the ‘Tennessee demon’) is one of those stories which made a big impression on me when I was a child, something I first encountered in a ‘mysteries of the unexplained’ compendium and which I’ve reflected on ever since with a mixture of fascination […]
If you could have back a moment in time – to say something differently, or to ask something you never asked – would you? Or, if you could tell someone in the here-and-now what you really think of them, or what they did to you – would you? That is the central premise behind short […]
If ever you’ve wondered, deep in your heart, what an experimental/arthouse spin on The Fall of the House of Usher would look like, then wonder no further: The Bloodhound explores similar themes of warped family dynamics, fatalism and isolation, though by coming at it in an ultra-modern location with a low-exposition, dialogue-lite story. A first […]
Anything for Jackson is a horror film which clearly starts as it means to go on – offering drastic, sometimes bizarre contrasts between humdrum suburban life and an occult storyline which is recognisable, but no less OTT for it. The resulting film is like a mash-up between Hereditary (2018) and Inside (2007) – make of […]